Month: April 2014

As he aspires to build his football program, coach Sonny Dykes doesn’t need to look far to find a model for success.

“There’s a lot of different ways to win in football and sports in general,” he said Tuesday during a media briefing, three days after the close of spring workouts.

“The Yankees have won by having the biggest payroll and the biggest superstars. And the A’s have won by having the smallest payroll, no superstars and a great team.

“You have to figure out who you are. I think right now we’re a little bit more like the A’s than the Yankees. And that’s fine.”

What that means to Dykes and the Bears a year after staggering to a 1-11 record is creating a culture where the whole is bigger than its parts. Cal’s roster isn’t bulging with five-star recruits, but can achieve beyond those expectations, Dykes said.

“We’ve got to kind of embrace that and buy into that. I just believe that is how you sustain a program, by having good people and creating a good culture and getting guys to play hard for each other on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

“I think we’re much further along than we were, but I’m not quite sure we’re there yet.”

Cal led 24-0 and was never threatened by Central Washington to set up a matchup vs. BYU in the title game for the eighth time in nine years.

BYU beat Cal 27-24 for last year’s title. The Bears topped the Cougars in five of their other seven meetings since 2006.

*****

TRACK AND FIELD: Cal won the men’s team title at its Brutus Hamilton Challenge, led by senior Tom Blocker, whose winning time of 10.41 seconds in the 100-meter dash was a personal record and elevates him to No. 5 time on the school’s all-time list.

Blocker and football running back Khalfani Muhammad contributed to a second-place finish in the 400 relay with a season-best time of 40.25.

Sophomore Thomas Joyce was second in the Don Bowden Mile with a time of 4:00.49, which ranks No. 8 on Cal’s all-time list. Sydney Gray won the women’s Marilyn Davis mile in a personal-best of 4:22.18.

*****

It hasn’t been a great season for the Cal baseball team, but Brenden Farney’s RBI single sparked a three-run 10th inning and gave the Bears a 7-4 win over Stanford at Sunken Diamond.

Encouraged but hardly satisfied, Cal closed its spring workouts Saturday with an 86-play scrimmage in front of an announced crowd of 2,500 fans at Memorial Stadium.

Five months after after completing an historically bad 1-11 season, the Bears are focused on their future, including their Aug. 30 season opener at Northwestern.

Sophomore quarterback Jared Goff said the team is ready to make a leap forward. “We’re done with everything that had to do with last year,” he said. “We’re a brand new team now and we’re ready to go.”

Coach Sonny Dykes has called the Bears a work in progress, and he continues to see good and bad.

“I thought we got better,” Dykes said of his team’s work over the past four weeks. “Our guys are still learning what it takes to win at this level. I’m not sure we completely understand that yet.

“I certainly like where we’re headed, but we still have a long way to go.”

The defense had the upper hand early on Saturday, prompting defensive end Brennan Scarlett to pronounce, “We were dominating.” The offense was more effective in the second half, Dykes noted.

Goff, just 5 for 11 for 27 yards in the first half, was 9 for 12 for 143 yards the rest of the way. He had an 8-yard touchdown pass to Kenny Lawler and a 37-yard completion to Bryce Treggs, who made a nice over-the-shoulder catch.

When we last saw Sebastian on game day, he was being carted off the turf after tearing his Achilles tendon in the 2013 opener against Northwestern. That catastrophe came on the heels of suffering a concussion during fall camp that was scary enough an ambulance rolled into Memorial Stadium to take him to the hospital.

But the redshirt junior safety from McDonough, Ga., is on his way back. He participated in Cal’s spring workouts, doing whatever he felt his body would allow, and expects to be in the mix Saturday (11 a.m.) when the Bears hold their spring game.

Plus, by the end of this spring semester he will be just one class shy of earning his degree in American studies.

That will give Sebastian an array of options. He plans to take just a single class in the fall, allowing him to concentrate on all things football.

In the meantime, he intends to take the GRE this summer to become eligible for grad school. Asked about his plans for the fall of 2015, when he’d be able to play his final football season, Sebastian admitted, “I have not thought that far.”

Unspoken is the possibility he could enter the NFL draft in 2015. But he wants to study broadcast journalism and can easily envision himself doing so at Cal.

“You can’t beat a Berkeley education, so if I have that opportunity to do that again (as a grad student), the option’s definitely there,” Sebastian said after practice Wednesday.

Former Cal football player Ted Agu, who collapsed after a Feb. 7 team training run, died of the same heart condition that took the lives of athletes including Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis, according to the Alameda County Coroners office.

Sgt. Paul Graves confirmed that Agu died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is an excessive thickening of the heart muscle, and is a common cause of unexpected death in athletes.

Graves said the pathologist’s report, which will not be complete for another couple weeks, did not indicate any other significant conditions which may have contributed to Agu’s death. CBS Sports reported shortly after Agu’s death that he had tested positive for the sickle cell trait.

Agu was a 21-year-old junior defensive end and pre-med student from Bakersfield.

A spokesman for Cal athletics said the school has not yet seen the coroner’s report.

“Out of respect for Ted Agu’s family, we will have no comment on the Alameda County Coroner’s findings until that office publicly issues its final report,” the athletic department said in a statement. “Our team, our student-athletes and our University will continue to honor Ted Agu. He will forever be a beloved member of our Golden Bear family.”

According to the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association website, the muscle thickening of the heart occurs without an obvious cause, but prevents proper blood flow.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the most common of all genetic heart conditions, according to the HCMA, affecting 1 in 500 people in the general population. Based on that, the association estimates as many as 600,000 people in the United States have HCM.

The website says there is no gender, age or ethnic factor specific to the condition, and no specific symptom or complaint unique to HCM.

“The reason for the onset of symptoms is often not clear,” according to the HCMA website.

The competition for placekicker will continue into fall camp, coach Sonny Dykes said after Wednesday’s practice.

Sophomore Noah Beito had the upperhand early in spring camp, but the depth chart released on Wednesday showed Beito, senior James Langford and redshirt freshman Matt Anderson separated by “or.”

For all the troubles the Bears experienced last season, placekicker was an oasis of consistency. Graduating senior Vincenzo D’Amato converted 17 of 20 field goal attempts and all but one of his PAT tries.

“Vince was a mentally tough kid,” Dykes said. “If something didn’t go his way, he reacted incredibly well, just believed in himself and grinded through it. That’s unfortunately rare in kickers a lot of times.”

Dykes and his coaching staff will be looking for that mental toughness when they choose among the three candidates in August.

Coach Sonny Dykes said the Bears will run about 80 plays Saturday during their Cal Spring Football Experience.

The occasion won’t be strictly a spring game. There are lots of festivities planned to go with the scrimmaging, but a full-fledged spring game isn’t practical, Dykes said.

“When you’re an uptempo offense the problem you run into is spring games become a real pain in the rear end,” he said. “When we were at Louisiana Tech we ran I think in the neighborhood of 75 plays in the first quarter of the spring game one year.

“There’s no rest. You have 22 guys playing, so it’s basically like 150 plays. That’s a bit of an issue.”

Dykes said Saturday’s free event will have a mix of fan interaction. “Try to make it a good experience,” he said.

Gates will open at 10 a.m., with the scrimmage beginning at 11 a.m. Pac-12 Networks will televise the proceedings.

As the Bears prepare for Saturday’s spring practice finale — the Cal Spring Football Experience — there is improved depth and experience almost everywhere on the field.

Except defensive tackle.

With junior Mustafa Jalil shelved while recovering from offseason knee surgery and sophomore Jacobi Hunter out for personal reasons, the Bears have no one at the position with any Division I game experience who will participate on Saturday.

“That’s going to be the big position that’s up in the air for us,” coach Sonny Dykes said Wednesday after practice.

Cal released a depth chart earlier in the day, and redshirt senior Harrison Wilfley and redshirt junior Marcus Manley are listed as the starting defensive tackles.

Wilfley was recruited as a tight end, then moved to defensive end, the position he played at American River College. The 6-foot-5 Sacramento native redshirted last season because of a shoulder injury, and this spring was moved to defensive tackle.

Manley came to Berkeley from City College of San Francisco a year ago, and was redshirted.

Trevor Kelly, who arrived this spring as a transfer from College of San Mateo, also is playing the position, along with redshirt freshman Tony Merkari. Kelly, at 6-2, 315 pounds, needs to drop about 20 pounds, Dykes said.

The total D-I game day experience of those four players: Zero.

The Bears’ experienced player at the position is Jalil, once a top-10 national recruit at his position. He remains a question mark after missing all of last season.

Dykes said Jalil underwent surgery to alleviate pain in his knee caused by a lack of cartilage. Doctors tell the coaching staff the surgery was a success, but Jalil was held out of spring ball to let the knee recover fully.

“He’s feeling much better, but he hasn’t done much,” Dykes said. “He’s got to get in shape, get his weight down and give himself a chance to be a player.”

Still, Jalil was enough of a question mark that the Bears signed JC defensive tackles Kelly and David Davis, who will arrive in August.

Cal has released a depth chart entering Saturday’s Cal Spring Football Experience, otherwise known as its spring game, otherwise known as its final practice of spring ball.

This is not the depth chart we will see the week of the 2014 opener against Northwestern. This reflects who has practiced during spring ball and/or who is available to participate Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

You will notice, for instance, that WR Chris Harper is not listed as a starter because he has basically sat out spring workouts following offseason shoulder surgery. Same thing for CB/safety Stefan McClure (knee) and DT Mustafa Jalil (knee). Chris Adcock (knee) could alter the offensive line picture when he returns in August.

(Players in italics and parenthesis injured and/or unavailable for the Cal Spring Football Experience listed at their positions in no specific order)*has utilized redshirt season prior to 2014; ^sixth-year senior in 2014